Help Ugly Duckling Presse Print Big!

The ducklings at Ugly Duckling Presse have a special fundraising event going on—and they invite you to be a part of it! Ugly Duckling Presse is raising funds, courtesy of the popular fundraising platform, Indiegogo, to buy a new letterpress AND move said letterpress into UDP HQ over at the Old American Can Factory (that’s Brooklyn, New York—to be precise).

They write:

To meet the rising demands of the literary marketplace, we need your help!

Your investment will help us print faster, bigger, and better with this top-of-the-line obsolete technology.

Um, this is nothing fancy…

Ugly Duckling Presse has been happily making do with scavenged, heavily used, and seriously flawed technology for about 20 years: from over-tonered xerox machines to wonky saddle-stitchers, crooked straight-edges, and squeaky clam-shell presses. We have always printed our own book covers and ephemera on available tools to cut costs, and along the way we seem to have developed an amateur design style, a mix of intuition, material opportunism, and elbow grease.

We would like to keep working this way and training our interns and apprentices in the art and craft of DIY letterpress printing. But there is a limit to our patience with uncooperative machinery!

Our most important piece of printing equipment has slowly gone from challenging to unusable.

To keep ourpublishing program going, we need a decent, working press that’s built to do what we need it to do — print faster, bigger, and better — so we can crank out 1000 copies of a cover and bind some poetry inside.

Help raise the funds we need to purchase and move a hulking Vandercook proofing press sometime this fall.

Please consider donating. Any amount is welcome.

We’re a nonprofit, so take a tax break, and we’ll promise to keep printing poetry.

The thing costs like $10,000, moving included.

We’re hoping to make five grand here and start looking for a press.

Any leads?

If you can lead us to a good press we’ll give you a year-long subscription.

If you can donate or lead us to a free working press we will give you a lifetime subscription to UDP and engrave your name on the press.